Small business growth depends on your digital marketing strategy. At its heart are your website and all the tactics you use to drive traffic to it. It encompasses everything in your digital footprint.
Whether you’re developing one for the first time or updating yours, these best practices will guide your success.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A strategy for digital marketing is the plan for how you’ll establish and maintain your online presence. It includes multiple channels, including:
- Your website and the content you create for it
- Organic search and SEO
- Social media
- Paid ads
- Email marketing
The ultimate objective of your strategy is to increase awareness of your business and its solutions to your customers. The strategy documents how you’ll launch campaigns to meet specific goals around growth and revenue.
Next, we’ll list the best practices every digital marketing strategy should include.
1. Know Your Customers
For digital marketing to work, you need to build buyer personas. These are characterizations of your ideal buyers. You can define these based on actual data you have about customers and blanket assumptions you can make about their needs.
The more detailed your personas are, the more targeted you can be with your tactics. It also helps you develop relevant content that would attract them. For example, if you own a local spa and salon, you may define a persona as females between the age of 25 and 65 who live within 10 miles of your business. Further, your data may offer you more precise details on demographics. You can also assume that customers have discretionary income and care about their skin and wellness.
With a persona like this, you can target keywords they may be searching for and direct social media ads to them that they’d find attractive.
2. Set SMART Goals
Digital marketing goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) to keep you focused on what you need to accomplish. Your strategy should always contain goals so you know what you’re working toward. They can range from new customer acquisition to selling more of a product or service to opening a new location.
Get more information on setting SMART goals in our post.
3. Evaluate Your Current Digital Footprint for Opportunities
Even if you have a website and nothing else, you have digital assets. A more established organization has many more. Assessing where you are will give you a path to get where you want to be.
Some key elements to look at include:
- Your website design, layout, and content
- Engagement on social media profiles
- Performance of email marketing
- Lead quality of paid ads
- Search engine ranking for keywords
After analyzing your current digital landscape, you can prioritize what to work on that will deliver the best value relating to your goals.
4. Publish Content Consistently
Regularly creating content for your audience — blogs, videos, guides, etc. — supports your visibility in search and provides you with assets to post on social media and offer in emails. The more content you have that addresses customer needs and demonstrates your expertise, the better your digital marketing campaigns will perform.
5. Test Paid Ads in Multiple Channels
Paid ads can increase website traffic and conversions. You’ll want to choose channels where your audience is and would be appealing to them. Do a few test campaigns in paid search or social media to see what resonates, then move your budget to the ones that do the best.
Pair Your Digital Marketing Strategy with a Partner
As a small business, managing and maintaining your digital marketing strategy and the tactics associated with it can be time-consuming and challenging. Working with a digital marketing agency makes everything seamless, so you don’t have to get bogged down with logistics. Connect with us today to learn about what partnering with us is like.
